


Even Though We Fell Apart

by professorcockblock



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-26
Updated: 2011-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-26 13:25:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/professorcockblock/pseuds/professorcockblock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus Lupin circa. 1993: A study in chocolate and scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even Though We Fell Apart

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the early hours of bollocks-o'clock, due primarily to a lack of tea and sleep. This fic is for the followers of fuckyeahremussirius, who will probably never be allowed to see it but that nevertheless inspired me to write.

He doesn’t think about Sirius. He can’t. He can’t. He stares at himself in the dirty bathroom mirror and doesn’t think about Sirius. He shatters a glass whilst washing up and doesn’t think about Sirius. He fucks a muggle boy with dark hair and sharp cheekbones in a filthy alley way, and doesn’t think about Sirius. When forced to say something, when polite conversation dictates that he should, he pictures a man ravaged and broken, sleeping naked in his own piss and shit as rattling breath and scabbed hands flay the memories from his sanity, and he doesn’t think about Sirius. He can’t.

Time, they say, heals all wounds. And it’s true, he thinks with something that might once have been born from rage, but that reaches the surface only as dull bitterness. It’s true. Blot clots to control the immediate haematosis, that irrational certainty that you will never stop bleeding; the skin inflames and it hurts, god it hurts; new cells are created, and that’s just isn’t it? New new new, everything new, replaced and refitted until there’s nothing left of that hurt that was once your flesh; the skin contracts to reduce the size of the wound, and people stop looking at you like the abrasion is the only thing they see; finally the cells shift themselves, remodelling, folding and refolding until the skin runs smooth, and this, he knows, is where he’s supposed to breathe again. This is where his wound is healed, where time has done its work, where the revulsion of his regret is finally replaced by an aching acceptance. This is where that is supposed to happen. He reads, he always reads, so he knows all this of course, knows about epithelial cells and granulation tissue. He knows it with the same inane unimportant understanding that he holds for the successions of medieval monarchs, with the same apathy he has for Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration. These things aren’t helpful but he knows them all the same. It’s not quite comforting, but it almost is.

Time heals all wounds. He’s had enough scars to understand the principle, has enough to show for the good work of myofibroblasts and phagocytosis, has an understanding of mutilation beyond Mad-Eye and Bellatrix and all the rest of the veterans. But the whole thing doesn’t make sense to him. Time heals all wounds, they say. But how can a scar be the remnant of something past if the cells, the skin, even the bloody fucking molecular structure of it, is new? How can he remember when all he has are replays of replays of replays of memories? He can’t. He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.  
And suddenly the anger is overwhelming, it pulls his frame apart and tears muscle from bone until blood pounds and the wolf howls and it’s not even full moon yet but all that exists is the need to see something destroyed. He’s so angry, so angry, so angry, and so very, very fucking sorry. Sorry mum, sorry dad, sorry James. Sorry James. Sorry James. Sorry Lily. He wakes sometimes in the middle of the night, sweating and cold, and he’s not sure that he remembers their faces right. Panic, panic, panic and  _Oh god. Oh god jesus fuck, James, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember where the freckles on her arms met her shoulders, I don’t remember what the last words you said to me were, couldn’t even keep hold of that stupid fucking thing you used to do with your hair to impress her. I couldn’t even keep it. And I tried so hard, oh god, oh god, James I tried so fucking hard. I’m so fucking sorry. I’m so fucking sorry._  He thinks it to himself, screams it behind closed eyelids, consumed and undone by sleeplessness and  _sorry_  and  _where the fuck did you all go_ , curled tight into a ball, as if he’s had all his screws taken out and there’s nothing to hold him together but his own shattered arms.

The others offer him sympathy in the form of food and worried looks, and empathy in the form of something that is almost but not quite understanding. In circles as tight as theirs people consider his losses at their own, as if the collapse of his life, the tears in the fabric of himself, are theirs to prod at and question. As if any of them knew James and Lily and Peter and-… as if anyone knew them like he did. Like he thought he did. _Like he thought he did_. The people – his friends? He doesn’t know anymore, can’t really bring himself to care – they don’t understand that he doesn’t want to fucking heal, doesn’t want to deal, or cope, or share the fucking burden. The hurt is his. It’s his, it’s his, it’s his, and they can’t fucking have it. You hear that, Dumbledore!? _You can’t fucking take this too._   _Not this._

It all stops eventually though, slows down to nothing, falls back almost imperceptibly to zero in the same way he supposes the world ultimately will. The people stop coming to check on him, and their concern shifts to something more pressing, to someone more broken, more deserving. He should be grateful or angry or something, but mostly he just doesn’t even notice.  
More than anything, more than anger and apology, more than the screaming in his head and the bile in his throat, more than any of that, it just  _hurts_. Sometimes it’s a dull ache, the all-consuming weight of loss making every tiny movement a small battle, every gross motor function a war. Other times though, it’s fire. Even still. Even now. Because that’s just it, isn’t it, he thinks; time doesn’t heal all wounds, it just replaces the lost skin with something that does a good enough impression that others can pretend you’re not broken anymore. They get to tell each other how well you seem to be eating now, how much of the old you you’ve regained, and all the while you’re burning. Still cracked. You’re the lone head of beast that was born with four, and you’ll never not be lost. A revulsion of loneliness born from the memory of what it was to be whole.

He reads, he always reads, so he knows that there is a theory that the universe will continue expanding forever. That the finite amount of particles will eventually be dwarfed by the infinite and growing space between them, so that nothing can interact anymore and chemistry is forgotten as every atom becomes its own island. That the universe will not end in a bang or even a whimper, but rather in a big freeze, in an infinite expanse of nothingness. Sometimes he thinks that this is how he will end too; in an infinite expanse of nothingness. Of nothingness and nothingness and nothingness and the absence of the Big Dog constellation, the loss of the Sirius star in a million million years of his own expanding detachment.

He doesn’t know how to exist in this state, to rectify this chasm of duality, the burning, burning, burning he feels for the past, and the complete lack of anything he feels for the present. If there was something, anything, that he had left. Just something to hope for, to pray for.  
 _Harry_ , he thinks, and there’s a flicker, a spark of something other than exhaustion. But Harry is not Theirs anymore, is not – never was, never even nearly was – his. Harry belongs to fat, bigoted muggles with too much money and not enough love. Sorry Lily, sorry James, sorry Peter. Oh and thank you very fucking much Professor fucking Dumbledore, still acting after all this time like the infallible mentor. Like sending weaker men into battle makes you great, as if letting them die for you makes you wise, like the fact that your darling boyfriend lost his shit and killed people half a lifetime ago makes you a hero. Well it doesn’t, Albus, _and I should fucking know._

He reads, he always reads, so when news of the escape reaches him it’s almost inevitable that it does so in words. Complex sentences tell him to be afraid, paragraph breaks and punctuation marks warn him to stay vigilant, great sweeping clauses claw at his memories and force him back, back, back;  _Pettigrew. 12 muggles. The Potter’s. Harry._He reads the article 8 times through and he doesn’t think about Sirius. He hears whispers and rumours of the raving madman, of  _‘He’s at Hogwarts’_ , and he doesn’t think about Sirius. When people discuss with barely hidden glee how he might’ve escaped, he nods vaguely with a manufactured crease between his brows, pictures the big black shaggy dog that was once (is still) the center of his world, and he doesn’t think about Sirius. He can’t, he can’t.

When Dumbledore asks him to come to Hogwarts, no, to  _go back_  to Hogwarts, he says yes. He knows what it means, knows that to be there now, like this, will be to bastardise his youth, to use up all those memories until there’s nothing left. Going back will means ghosts. But he wants it now, wants it all, wants to remember how things were, and not the reality of a hundred wrecked and shattered Sirius’s screaming  _look at me, you spineless bastard!_  from the front page of a hundred Daily Prophet’s. Harry will be there, and more than anything he wants to protect him. Even still. Even now. Just to keep that one promise. All the rest went to shit. Sorry Evans, sorry Prongs, sorry Wormtail. Sorry Wormtail.

So he goes back. Finds an empty compartment on the Hogwarts Express that he thinks might look familiar, might look like a train compartment that he was happy in once, that he laughed in once, that he loved in. It’s probably not the same one, but he curls up and lets it wash over him all the same.  
When he wakes it is to darkness, and he knows with the instinct of the damned and war-torn what follows this impenetrable black. There’s a beat in which he hopes he is wrong and knows he isn’t. Ragged breath, scabbed hands, and then...  _Sirius_. Sirius fills every atom, every pore, salt in every scar that the murderous bastard loved, vitriol in every last one that he tore. Remus does what he's always done and chases the thought away, does so with silver light and memories of James and Lily and Peter, all worn around the edges by now, just replays of replays of replays of memories. It’s enough. Even still. Even now.  
And then there’s Harry. Harry, who looks like James and acts like Lily and calls him _Professor_. Somehow that makes him feel so very tired, so very old. He forces the boy to take enough chocolate to last a small family for a week, and leaves the compartment with some excuse that he doesn't really hear himself say. Out in the corridor he breathes. He breathes and breathes and waits for breathing to be enough again. He recognises the scenes flying past the window, and absently notes that they’re nearly there, nearly back, will be at Hogsmead in 15 minutes or so. Soon there will be a platform full of children, joking and swapping dementor stories with the ease and excitement of the young and naïve. Soon there will be lessons and pupils and  _Sir, no word of a lie, McLaggen’s niffler ate my homework, sir!_  There will be feasts and Dumbledore and  _oh god_ , he thinks with the smallest hint of amusement,  _Snivellus_. There will be walls that close in on him, smothering him with his past, and a forest that aches for him to howl there once more. But for now, he just breathes. He breathes and breathes and waits for breathing to be enough. He breathes and breathes and doesn’t think about Sirius.


End file.
